Planning Clean Energy Export from Norway to Europe

The CleanExport project analyzes pathways for large-scale, decarbonized energy export from Norway to Europe. The feasibility and evolvement of different pathways hinges on a range of factors including EU energy and emission policies and taxonomies, technology developments and learning rates, the ETS carbon price, and more. To narrow the range of pathways for clean energy export, we have divided the scenarios into four categories: Decarbonized gas push, green hydrogen push, electricity push, and a balanced system development. Future valorization of Norway?s energy resources and infrastructure, both existing and new, will vary greatly depending on which, if either, of these scenarios that materializes in the decades to come. The CleanExport project has this year pushed forward the energy-system model development that governs the basis to analyze scenarios for clean energy export within this defined scenario categorizes. The model, that will be made open, is developed as a highly modular modeling framework to facilitate integration of multiple energy carriers, detailed technology descriptions, and the necessary time and spatial resolutions to analyze long-term energy infrastructure utilization. This year, key features of the energy-system model has been implemented, tested, and validated on a first, limited case study on exploitation of offshore wind. The current model suit constitutes the basis for implementation of comprehensive, interconnected CCS and hydrogen value chains in 2022, as well as the initialization of large-scale case studies on clean export of multiple energy vectors.

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The energy system is currently undergoing a dramatic transition. Climate change mitigation requires a carbon constrained energy with renewable energy and other low emission energy carriers playing an increasingly important part. This transition is especially important for Norway whose industry and exports rely heavily on fossil fuels. In order to maintain its position as an energy-exporting nation, it is important to analyse how Norwegian energy export can be decarbonised and what the best route to said decarbonised energy export is. Furthermore, as different energy carriers in the energy system become increasingly connected, an analysis of the complete energy system is required. CleanExport will analyse both how Norway can maintain a position as an energy-exporting nation in a decarbonised energy system, and how to exploit synergies between the Norway's available energy resources. A novel, open and integrated modelling framework will be developed by combining and tailoring existing modelling tools for the integration of natural gas with carbon capture, hydrogen, hydropower and wind power. The new framework will provide analysis of interactions and complementaries between these different energy carriers, and enable investment analysis on how different scenarios affect the best solution to decarbonised Norwegian energy export. A central part of the project will therefore be to identify the role that different energy sources and conversion technologies will play in the forthcoming years. The multi-disciplinarity of the project will be assured by putting together the expertise of the SINTEF Energy Research, SINTEF Industry, and NTNU, together with close industrial collaboration with Equinor, Gassco, Total, Agder Energi, and Air Liquide.